Breadcrumbs

ELO board member Alan Liu is organizing a gathering – and launching a larger project – that will bring together theorists and practitioners from the humanities, arts, social sciences, computer science, and industry to talk about the fate of reading in the new media age. The “UCSB Conversation Roundtables on Online Reading” Conference will serve to launch the Transliteracies Project. It all takes place June 17-18, 2005, in the University of California, Santa Barbara’s McCune Room (6020 HSSB).

How are people today “reading” in digital, networked environments? For example, what is the relation between reading and browsing, or searching? Or between reading and multimedia? Can innovations in technologies or interfaces increase the productivity, variety, and pleasure of these new kinds of reading? How can the historical diversity of human reading practices help us gauge the robustness of the new digital practices; and, inversely, how can contemporary practices provide new ways to understand the technical, social, and cultural dimensions of historical reading? The Transliteracies 2005 conference (Conversation Roundtables on Online Reading) assembles theorists and practitioners from the humanities, arts, social sciences, computer science, and industry to talk about the fate of reading in the new media age.

Three keynote presentations to mark out the diversity of disciplines and approaches needed to address the problem of online reading (keynoters: Anne Balsamo, Walter Bender, Adrian Johns). Three moderated, plenary conversation roundtables (1. Reading, Past and Present 2. Reading and Media 3. Reading as a Social Practice). A presentation session on “The Art of Online Reading.”

The conference launches the Transliteracies research project, which brings together humanities, social-science, and computer-science researchers to collaborate on technology development related to the future of textual experience. To register for the conference (free), comment on the seed questions for the roundtables, or learn more about the Transliteracies project, see http://transliteracies.english.ucsb.edu.